Betting Blind (21 page)

I pulled her on top of a boulder and kissed her. Our bodies pressed together, and our jackets flapped in the wind. She locked her hands around my neck and pulled me closer. The sun was crazy bright, and the air was cold, and she was kissing me like she couldn’t get enough.

I wanted to drink in every part of her. I slid my hands under her shirt, and she pulled back, laughing, and stepped off the boulder. “This place feels like another country,” she said.

“I know what you mean.” I took her hand and pulled her straight into the desert. We were Adam and Eve on Mars.

“It makes me want to move off the grid.”

“Just go off into the wilderness like a hermit or something?” I asked.

“Yeah. Well, not a hermit. I’d want a guy with me.” She glanced at me. “My husband and kids, someday. But yeah, sometimes I think about it. I wish I had a big piece of land like this, far away from everything, with no computers, maybe not even a phone, and a beautiful house and a . . . a farm or something. I’d raise my own food.”

I smiled. “You obviously don’t know much about farming.”

“Well, not here, but somewhere you could farm.”

“You want to wake up at the crack, squeeze nasty cow titties to get milk, chop wood in the freezing cold, pull a bunch of weeds, and then—what?”

She was giggling. “Did you say ‘cow titties’?”

I nodded and said, “Big droopy cow titties,” because I loved her laugh. Then I added, “The way to go off the grid is save up bank, rent a cabin somewhere with restaurants like five miles down the road, and live there for a month until you get sick of it.”

“That’s too easy. I like things to be hard.”

“Yeah, you do.” I kissed her.

“I warned you.” She kicked a stone, and it went thumping across the ground into a prickly bush. “What do you think it was like before computers and cell phones? Before everybody started living online?”

“I bet it was more peaceful,” I said. She was actually getting me to imagine moving with her to some shack in the woods.

“Yeah, and more
real
. Like, if people were talking to a person, they were with that person. If they were playing a game, they were moving pieces with their hands. If they were listening to music, it was because someone was right there, playing for them.”

I interrupted her. “So you want to go back to before music was recorded? That would mean no—” I almost said Roots, and then I remembered who I was talking to. “No Berlin Philharmonic, unless you went to Berlin.”

“I know. I’m not saying I want to live like that. I’m just saying maybe there was something good about the way people used to do things. The Internet and phones just . . . I don’t know. They break your brain into a thousand pieces. Maybe your soul, too. Who knows?”

I thought about that. “I’ll move off the grid with you for a few months,” I told her. “But I’m not farming.”

She giggled. “I’ll have a vegetable garden, and you can . . . What do you want to do?”

“Stay in the bedroom with you. We can get a patchwork quilt if you want.”

She thought that was funny, but I wasn’t kidding.

We walked awhile longer, and then she said, “I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday. I’m getting really hungry.”

I looked at the sun, which was lighting up a million different shades of red in the rocks. “Yeah, we should get back on the road. We can stop somewhere and eat, and then we’ll keep going until Vegas. We’ve got what, three hundred miles?”

“Something like that.”

We headed back to the car. Before she got in, Irina bent down, picked up two rocks, and gave me one. It was about as big as a quarter, dark reddish brown, and rough like sandpaper. “So we can remember this place,” she said. She tucked hers into her purse, frowned, and moved her hand around under the flap. “Oh yeah. Was this from you?” She pulled out the Russian egg I’d left on her windowsill.

“No, it was from the Russian Easter Bunny.”

She laughed and grabbed me and gave me a hard, happy kiss. Then we got in the car and took off down the road.

The first place we saw didn’t look like a restaurant, but it had a sign that said “Beer/Food/Lodging,” so we stopped. It was a beat-up old shack made of wood so washed-out it looked white, with a tin roof on fire from the setting sun. It was perched on the edge of a hill, and it looked like a puff of wind might blow it down. There was a big deck stretching over the hill on some rickety beams, and the door was open. Johnny Cash was pouring out.

“You sure you’re up for this?” I said. “We could find a real restaurant somewhere.”

Irina shook her head. “No way. This looks interesting.”

I shrugged and followed her up the hill. Long grass was growing between the cracks of the stairs, and burrs grabbed my pant legs. Twenty or so gleaming Harleys were lined up at the side of the building on a long patch of concrete. I wondered how they got up there, and then I saw a dirt road winding behind the place, and I realized we’d come up the back way.

The Cash song ended, and Janis Joplin started belting out “Bobby McGee” in that scratchy, smoky voice of hers. Irina was grinning as she walked through the door. I stepped in behind her and watched every head turn. Fifteen or twenty of the most tatted-up, black-leathered, ratty-bearded, dirtiest muthas I ever saw were crowded up to the bar. There were a couple biker mamas, too, almost as big as their men, with serious cleavage and wicked stares. The place was filled with so much smoke, my first breath felt like taking a drag.

Irina walked right in and sat down at an old Formica two-top. I pulled out a ripped vinyl chair, sat across from her, and looked at the almost-empty squeeze bottle of ketchup, cracked bottle of Tabasco, and rusty silver napkin holder with no napkins left. Mickey’s would have to give up the title for Worst Dive.

The bar was a plank of wood against the wall, and it was covered with jars of weird floating things: pickles, eggs, and some scary white blobs. “Feet” was written on the white blob jar in black marker. The ground was full of ashes and peanut shells, and there were old playbills on the wall, and a “Wanted” poster from like a hundred years ago.

“You gonna have to come up here to order,” called a high-pitched old man’s voice. “I ain’t leaving the bar.”

“You bring back the menus. I’ll save our table,” said Irina, grinning.

I gave her a look and headed to the bar. There’s nothing like a crowd of four-hundred-pound leathery dudes going silent as you walk up to make you want to turn around and get the hell out.

“You old enough to be in here?” said the bartender. I could see him now, a tiny shriveled guy with a dirty white beard and bright blue eyes. He was wearing a flannel shirt and one of those crazy string ties with a chunk of turquoise on it.

I pulled out my ID and slid it across the bar, but he waved it away. “Just had to ask. What you having?”

“A shot of Jack and . . .” I glanced at Irina. If I asked her, she might say Coke or something, and that was no fun. What did girls like? There was that orange drink my mom used to have. “A tequila sunset,” I told the bartender. “Do you have a menu?”

“Nope. We got wings and fries. Which you want?”

“Two of each.”

The bartender sloshed my whiskey into a big glass, way more than a shot’s worth, and pushed it across the bar. Then he made the tequila sunset with a dirty juice hose and a heavy hand on the tequila.

“Food be out in a minute,” he told me. The bikers hadn’t said a word the whole time, and it was giving me the willies. I carried our drinks back to the table and sat down.

“What’s this?” Irina looked suspiciously at her orange drink. She took a tiny sip and made a horrible face. “It’s sweet.”

“Sorry. I thought girls liked sweet stuff.”

“You could have asked.” Irina took my Jack and shoved the tequila sunset in front of me. “Now you have to drink it.”

“But—”

“I’m Russian. Russians don’t drink cough syrup.”

There was a rumble of laughs from the bar, and I realized the bikers had been listening. One of them lifted his beer to me. I grinned at him, then took a sip of tequila sunset. A little cough syrup wouldn’t kill me.

Irina frowned. “You’re not even going to toast?”

“Oh, sorry. To our trip.”

She clinked glasses with me—and knocked back that shot like water. One of the bikers hooted, and I stared at her. She’d pretty much torched my idea of her as an innocent, sheltered girl. “Whoa, Irina! That was a lot of straight whiskey!”

Irina pushed the glass toward the middle of the table. “Russians can drink,” she said matter-of-factly. But there was a proud look in her eye, and I had a feeling she was just showing off. The only other time I’d seen her with alcohol, at Morton’s party, she’d ditched it on a bookshelf.

“Order up,” hollered the bartender. We went to get our food. The wings and fries were piled up in yellow plastic baskets, shining with grease. I slid some cash across the bar and grabbed two of them.

“Why you being antisocial?” one of the bikers said to Irina. “You’re supposed to sit at the bar in a place like this.” He waved at the bartender. “Two more shots for the lady and her friend.”

Irina smiled at the man. “Thank you.” She picked up a wing from the basket and leaned on the bar. I set the baskets back down. The tequila was already smoothing me out. I got along with all kinds of people, so why not these guys? The drinks came, and the man clinked his beer against our glasses.

“I’m Beck. And this is T.C., Big Dave, Mad Dave, Butcher, Two-Dog Joe, Spider, Pam, Dino . . .” He rattled off their names, and suddenly there were smiles all around and lots of raised bottles. We’d been adopted by a bunch of Hells Angels.

I slammed my Jack, and after that, things got blurry. I remember inhaling the fries and wings in giant mouthfuls of hot salty grease, and I bought a drink for Beck because he’d gotten those drinks for us. Then I started talking with a skinny guy called Shingles, who looked part Indian. He had a leather vest and leather pants and a braid of long gray-black hair. Somehow we got into an argument about whether I’d eat a pickled pig’s foot, which was what he said the things in the jar were, and I did, and it wasn’t half-bad.

Then Shingles said I was all right, between eating the foot and having such a fine woman. I looked around for my “fine woman,” and I almost couldn’t see her through the black leather. I could hear her laughing, though. Pam and the other two biker mamas were sitting at the bar with their arms folded across their chests, watching the little mob around Irina. Their mouths were running and their eyes were half-shut, the way women’s eyes get when they’re talking shit.

After a few minutes, Irina broke out of her crowd of fans and came up to me. I didn’t like how the men were staring at her, but I guessed I couldn’t blame them.

“Can I have the car keys?” she asked.

“Why?”

She gave me a sassy smile. “You’ll see.”

I shrugged, found the keys in my pocket, and handed them over. She disappeared out the door, and suddenly I wondered why she wanted the keys. She was in no condition to drive, and she wouldn’t leave me . . . Would she?

I got up and went to the window. Irina had the trunk open and was pulling out—her violin. I went back to my seat. Should have known she couldn’t keep away from it.

When Irina pushed back through the door with her violin, there were mutters from the biker dudes. The bartender turned down the music. He held up his hands and called in his quaky old voice, “Settle down! Settle down!” He had a funny, excited smile, and I got excited, too, thinking how they were all going to be blown away when they heard what she could do on that thing.

Irina stood in the middle of the floor and lifted her violin to her chin. She wasn’t holding the bow too steady. It got so quiet you could hear the peanut shells cracking underfoot. Then she closed her eyes and pulled down her bow and
damn
—I don’t know what it was, but I’d never heard her play so amazing. It was a fast, wild, lonely tune that seemed perfect for the desert. It showed me a different side of her, a side that wasn’t so buttoned down and perfect—the same side that had been chugging drinks for the past hour, I guessed. I heard a tapping behind me, and I turned and saw the bartender watching with his eyes half-closed, his wrinkly hands drumming the counter.

Finally Irina lifted her bow off her violin and looked around the room. She smiled and took a little bow, like they probably trained her to do for concerts. Everybody cheered and hollered—except the women. They looked as if they’d like to take Irina’s bow and beat her with it. I clapped hard and whistled.

The bartender said shyly to Irina, “You mind if I have a try? Used to fiddle myself.”

She stepped up to the bar and handed over the violin, and the old dude tucked it under his chin and gave us all a mischievous look. Then he pulled the bow down like a gunshot and carved up that violin with the craziest, fastest, gunslinging, devil-down-in-Georgia tune I ever heard. His knuckles were big and red and popping, and his blue eyes were wide-open the whole time. His whole top half was jumping with the music.

When he finished, the bikers roared. The old man was bright red. It was cool to see him so happy. He handed the violin back to Irina.